The revolutionary movement (Bengal, Punjab, abroad)
Revolutionary terrorism in India's freedom struggle: the Bengal secret societies, Punjab and the Ghadar movement, and the abroad networks from 1897 to the 1930s.
The first phase: secret societies in Bengal (1897-1917)
Revolutionary nationalism arose as the militant wing of the Extremist current, convinced that constitutional petitioning under the Moderates had failed and that British rule could be ended only by organised political violence. Its earliest expression came in Maharashtra: the Chapekar brothers (Damodar and Balkrishna) assassinated W. C. Rand, the Poona Plague Commissioner, and Lt. Ayerst on 22 June 1897. But Bengal became the heartland after the Partition of Bengal (1905) radicalised a generation.
The Anushilan Samiti, founded in 1902 at Calcutta (with Promotha Mitter, and inspired by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Anandamath cult of Bande Mataram), and its Dacca branch under Pulin Behari Das (1906), became the chief organisations. The newspaper Yugantar (1906), run by Barindra Kumar Ghosh and Bhupendranath Datta (brother of Vivekananda), and Sandhya under Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, propagated armed revolt.
Landmark actions and trials
On 30 April 1908 Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki threw a bomb at Muzaffarpur intending to kill the hated magistrate Kingsford, but killed two English ladies (Mrs and Miss Kennedy). Chaki shot himself; Khudiram was hanged on 11 August 1908, aged 18. The ensuing Alipore Bomb Case (1908) put Aurobindo Ghosh and Barindra Ghosh on trial; C. R. Das defended Aurobindo, who was acquitted. Kanailal Dutt and Satyendranath Bose were hanged for killing the approver Narendra Gosain inside jail.
The Howrah Gang Case, the assassination of public prosecutor Ashutosh Biswas, and the Delhi Conspiracy Case (1912)—in which Rash Behari Bose and Sachindra Nath Sanyal organised the bomb thrown at Viceroy Lord Hardinge during his ceremonial entry into Delhi on 23 December 1912—marked the movement's peak. Rash Behari escaped to Japan; Sanyal later authored Bandi Jivan.
Wartime conspiracy
During the First World War the revolutionaries planned a coordinated rising. The Hindu-German Conspiracy sought German arms; the Indo-German Plot and the abortive February 1915 rising (betrayed by the spy Kirpal Singh) collapsed. The British struck back with the Defence of India Act, 1915, enabling detention without trial, and through wartime tribunals broke the Bengal and Punjab networks. By 1917 the first phase had been suppressed, though it bequeathed an ethic of sacrifice—tyaga—and a martyrology that the Gandhian era could not entirely absorb.
